The most common misdiagnosis in marketing. Loyalty metrics look healthy because they are being read off a small buyer base; the constraint is penetration, and loyalty spending will not move it.
7 tools across 3 of the 9 questions
The empirical regularity that brands with smaller market share have both fewer buyers and slightly lower loyalty among the buyers they have.
Breaks when Weakens where switching is contractually locked (telco, insurance) and in heavy B2B where the buyer universe is structurally small.
Understand the marketA stochastic model that predicts, from category structure alone, every brand's expected penetration, purchase frequency and buyer overlap.
Breaks when Assumptions fail with few players, high involvement, or one-off purchases. It also tells you nothing about why a deviation exists.
Understand the marketA two-factor account of brand growth: the probability of being noticed or recalled in a buying situation, and the ease of buying once you are.
Breaks when Where distribution is fixed and single-channel, the second term carries no information and everything collapses into the first.
Understand the marketA family of probability models that predict, from purchase history alone, how many purchases a customer will make next and whether they have quietly stopped buying.
Breaks when The models assume a customer's underlying purchase rate is stationary — that it does not change. So they break precisely when you intervene: sustained promotion, a price change, a category shift, a competitor entering. They are a forecast of what happens if nothing is done, which makes them a strong baseline and a poor evaluator of your own campaign. They also explain nothing: a customer with a 4% survival probability comes with no reason and no lever.
Keep customersThe proportion of each joining group still active, plotted against time since joining.
Breaks when You cannot read flattening before enough time has passed. A curve drawn from three months of data is drawn from hope.
Keep customersThe prescription, following from buyer-base structure, to reach as many category buyers as possible as continuously as possible rather than concentrating on heavy buyers.
Breaks when Inverts where the buyer universe is genuinely small and enumerable — a 300-account B2B list is a case where targeting really does pay.
Reach peopleChoosing the smallest group you could serve well enough that they would miss you if you vanished, and building for exactly them instead of for everyone.
Breaks when It contradicts the two best-evidenced entries on this site and it loses to both. Double Jeopardy says brands with fewer buyers also get lower loyalty from the buyers they have, so a small audience is penalised twice rather than compensated. Mental & Physical Availability and Reach Maximisation say growth comes from broad continuous reach into light buyers, and that the efficiency of narrow targeting is usually a growth loss. Godin's own framing is that the smallest viable audience is a stepping stone, not a compromise; held as a permanent strategy it is the mechanism by which small brands stay small.
Reach people